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Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

Exactly one hundred years ago, the state government of Colorado and the Rockefeller owned CFI company, (Colorado Fuel and Iron), committed an atrocity against poor striking workers – even before the Great Slaughter of World War I. This terrible atrocity possessed the infamous name of the Ludlow Massacre.

What was amazing about this particular miners’ struggle was that they represented various nationalities and cultures: Eastern European, German, Greek, Mexican, Anglo-American, Irish, Italian, New Mexican, British, French and even a few African-Americans. This motley ethnic group had finally had enough with the mining system practiced in the state of Colorado at the turn of the century.

America’s business elites had badgered the federal government for a more ‘disciplined and compliant’ workforce, so the US state apparatus willingly allowed millions of immigrants to enter its borders. The mine owners preferred to hire the newly arrived immigrants due to their willingness to accept low wages and that they all spoke different languages. Unions had troubles organizing against the mine bosses. Those mine bosses also built company towns. Sometimes they literally took over a town with a pit mine in it, and later, transformed the village into a mining town.

In the mining towns, the mine workers and their families lived in shacks without the basic hygienic systems. They had to pay high rents, and buy their basic supplies from the company stores, meaning clothes, foodstuffs and the basic articles for survival. The company stores nickel and dimed the workers on shelf items, and the workers had to use worthless company scrip papers. Sometimes, the mine company paid the workers in those worthless papers, instead of the regular notes.

Workers had to inform the mine company guards when leaving or arriving. The mine company guards ran the towns like the prisons. These legal criminals even murdered or tortured the uncooperative and rebellious workers in the dead of the night. There was really nothing the miners could do, since the main mining outfits had monopolistic owners, such as the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller’s 40 room villa was all the way on the other side of the continent anyway – Tarrytown, New York!

Mining was a very dangerous job. The mining schedule was a seven-day a week back and neck destroyer that went from sun up to sun down. Back then, accidents, explosions and mine disasters were quite common. Miners died through simple overwork, lung emphysema, suffocation-drowning through getting buried alive or due to flash flooding in the tunnels, or just having their bodies blown into various pieces due to sudden explosions. There was no compensation for any mining accident. A dead miner had to pay for his own burial, or the other miners just threw the dead weight into the common garbage ditch.

In Ludlow, the miners and their families created their own alternative town. They armed themselves with guns, set up a functioning mutual aid system at the campsite, squatted on the land, and the men wore ripped pants, overalls, caps on their heads, and red bandanas around their necks. This was the true origin of the term ‘redneck,’ yet in the current Amerikan Empire, racists and reactionaries have taken the class war term ‘redneck,’ as their own.

The state of Colorado and the Rockefeller monopoly counterattacked with allowing the company mine guards to join the Colorado State Militia. They too had guns – and cannons – and bombs. On April 20th, 1914 they fired upon the tent colony and burnt up the Ludlow miners-squatters camp, murdering around 20 people, most of whom were women and children.

This was not the end of the story. The men of the red bandanas moved the offensive into the Colorado hills. They killed mine guards, worker narc-snitches, and mine pit bosses. The actual number of killed company thugs is still unknown to this day. The miner-guerrillas were so successful in exterminating the mine managers and company town goons that Liberal Democrap, President Wilson sent into federal troops to intimidate the fighters.

Soon, the IWW solidarity union, or the Wobblies, joined with the miner-fighters, while the Rockefellers tried their hands at ‘company unions’ in order to squelch the mutual aid and solidarity networks. Eventually, the mine owners had to settle for union organization with the United Mine Workers. Now the miner job pays well, has some worker compensation packages, and there are less mine pit hours.

The miners had moved onto the war of offense because they had nothing else to lose. They had realized that they had become wage slaves.

Capitalism owes its evil birth from the rotting flesh of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery are historically intertwined like moss growing on an old stone building. We understand this history of Capitalism thanks to the nineteenth-century intellectual, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was however wrong about his general theories of history. Marx stated in his 1848 writings that all culture and history, called the ‘superstructure of society,’ came out of the ‘productive base of labor and work.’ This theory is incorrect. He was mistaken because he was a philosopher trying to become a historian. History is not a social science but an art of interpreting human struggles and violence. Like artists, humans simply create their own history, and make up their own culture.

Karl Marx was actually quite brilliant in describing the brutality of the capitalist system. Capitalism spreads like gangrene, and grows into monstrous monopolies, while it becomes ever more contradictory as it expands out into the farthest reaches of the planet. This tendency to overproduce, to over-control, and to over-extend leads into the contradictory world of class conflict over wage slavery.

Class conflict or class struggle is simply the continual and incessant changes coming from the owners-bosses in demanding more brutal work output from the workers. The owners want the workers to produce more and more until the poor laborers drop dead because the owners run the businesses for the sake of profit. ‘Profit’ comes from the French verb, ‘profiter,’ which implies, ‘to take advantage of someone.’

Yet the workers only want to work the least amount as possible, since they have to give up their lives, their time and their energy for a survival wage. This is the contradictory condition within all ‘businesses,’ both large and small, imprisoned inside the capitalist beast.

The worker or laborer transforms into the wage slave because he or she must have some income, or wage salary, in order to pay government taxes and rent-utility bills for shelter, and then pay for foodstuffs and clothes. Marx correctly surmised that all working people laboring for a wage have to then ‘sell themselves’ to the owners on the capitalist market. The owners hire managers or company commanders to hire out for them. The plantation boss used overseers to manage labor discipline. The wage slaves, like the slaves of ancient times, must willingly give up large portions of their personal time and strength in order to receive this survival wage or slave wage.

This particular labor-slave cycle continues until they are too old, badly injured, or simply worthless, within the general labor pool. Once they go, then the owner can easily find a younger and more compliant worker to replace the labor loss. When the slave never woke up from sleep or died while working, the plantation owner then visited the slave market for a replacement.

The company owner reviews the labor market through hiring managers that do the employment screening. It is the not the tyranny of useless money that eventually kills the spirit of the average worker-laborer-employee, rather it is the tyranny of the cruel labor market represented through a fetid pool of applicants.

The first capitalist systems in the late medieval period, such as Islamic culture and the Venetian Empire needed an easy and compliant labor source too. They used what all empires have used throughout history: the capture, kidnapping and slow murder of slaves. The Muslim caliphates raided the pagan coasts of East Africa and the Christian Balcans, while the Catholic Venetians raided Muslim and Orthodox Christian territories in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa. During the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, (1400s and 1500s), the newer Atlantic world empires of Spain and Portugal would also raid North Africa for a ready supply of slaves. Eventually they would both go deeper into the African continent.

The other Atlantic world empires followed them, such as the Dutch, (Netherlands), with France and Britain in the seventeenth-century, (1600s). Following the Brazilian Portuguese use of captured slaves from the Tupamori Nation, the Spanish soon became the leaders in the use of captured native slaves from the Mapuche Nation of central Chile, the Guarani Nation of Paraguay, and the Apache Nation in the Red Rocks, or ‘Colorado’ frontier of Nuevo Mejico, (New Mexico). In the 18th century, (1700s), the British Empire would even overtake both the French Empire and the Portuguese Empire in becoming world history’s greatest kidnapping-mass murder-slave trade potentate from Africa to Asia to the Americas.

This imperial political-economic system transformed into Mercantile capitalism. The royal state with favored investors, usually aristocrat-noble relations or court favorites, controlled joint stock companies and the profits of final sale. Meanwhile, the slave planters had to bear numerous credit-debts through purchasing slaves and dealing with cash crop fluctuations in the market, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, opium and cotton.

Due to this capitalistic ‘mercantile’ monopoly, a new group of outlaws emerged in order to take fast money and loot for themselves, commonly called back then, ‘pirates.’ But for the West Indian ‘white’ planters, slaves were an excellent resource because they could also resale such movable capital. In the case of the Africans, they were the victims of kidnapping slave traders in Africa, and they had no legal resources. They were socially dead human waste.

Britain was also notorious for using just as many ‘white slaves,’ as their ‘black or African ones.’ The white slaves were often the victims of kidnapping rings found all over England and occupied Ireland. When the white slaves began to fraternize with the African ones, then African slavery began to have more ominous, permanent tones.

Britain’s world-wide kidnapping-slave-mass murder system was so successful that it freed up a special commandeering class of scientists, inventors and investors to fund and experiment in technological advancement. It is no coincidence that during this same eighteenth-century, Industrial Capitalism came into fruition.

But the old system of plantation agriculture slavery in the American colonial-settler states, with its numerous inefficiencies and ugly brutality – had to go. Industrial capitalism valued the factory system, which produced a lot more, and hid its brutalities under smoke stacks and within inferno like worker dungeons. A new slave economy was necessary.

Instead of the owners paying for the worker-slaves’ crap food and flea infested huts, they could pay the losers a ‘wage.’ Now, the lowlifes had to pay their own way through life – and literally beg for a ‘job.’ They were technically free – but like any slave, they permanently lost their honor and dignity.

We have returned full circle to the slave trade of Ludlow. These terrible relations between capitalism and slavery still breathe their noxious fumes as I write.

Now capitalism functions under even greater duress, and its contradictions are so much more intense due to the actual extremes of global monopoly capitalism. Even the technically skilled or PhDs, such as myself, have to suffer under the indignity of permanent unemployment or underemployment. Billions of us currently experience life as capitalism’s victims. Even if we don’t work for ‘The Man,’ we still slave under the mental guilt of not having any good employment prospects. Unless we have family money to support us, we must continually resell ourselves on the slave labor market for survival.

If we really own property, which means no mortgage debts or property taxes whatsoever, then we are all technically homeless. We give dirty stares to the pathetic ‘home bums,’ or permanently homeless, on the street corners; yet, their numbers will only continue to grow. Some of us reading this essay, will also end our lives down there – dying slowly in the hopeless gutter.

For the rest of us that are ‘lucky to have work,’ our ‘freedom’ comes at a terrible price. A good chunk of our time and our lives goes to the owner’s personal profit margin, while our general quality of life suffers. We also live impaired under the political-cultural ideology of global monopoly capitalism, called Neo-Liberalism. Most of us live in overcrowded and unhealthy cities, where most of our ‘wage money’ goes into a toilet drain of rent housing.

In order to live economically, many of us have to consume crappy genetically modified food. Meanwhile, both our minds and stomachs have to tolerate regular scam artistry, ubiquitous, large public signs that warn and threaten with the smoldering potential of violent street crime. All of us must endure the institutional violence of petty felony laws, common deceitfulness between neighbors, continual advertising overload, and pathological lying from politicians. Like the old saying goes, ‘slavery has never ended.’

The year was 1876. The USA’s elites had organized the celebration of the Amerikan Empire’s Centennial Birthday through staging a gaudy World’s Fair in Philadelphia. They had a lot to celebrate due to recently subduing some recalcitrant competing elites in the southern region, officially called the Civil War 1860-65. Yet, their ‘hero’ Lincoln died with a bullet to the head.

American elites also decided to appease the old, southern plantation owners through restoring their properties and allowing a permanent racially divided system, which made ‘Dixiecrat’ rule a lot easier. The US government declared that Reconstruction was officially over, referred to as the Compromise of 1876.

During the putrid election of 1876, a Republican party hack, by the name of Hayes, won the presidency. Not only did the Empire survive a civil war and have to weather a hotly divided society through regional conflict, the corrupt American electoral system allowed a legal coup d’état government. That was definitely something to celebrate.

During that same epoch, the US government initiated its final extermination campaigns against the free native nations that hunted and traveled in the west. Recent outbreaks of bovine diseases and droughts had liquidated the vast populations of both herded cattle and wild cattle in the west. For the cattle barons, the massive die outs of cows were simple profit losses. The great western landholders, or Anglo property pimps, forced their workers to stake out barbed wire fences across the great western valleys and lowlands. If they couldn’t sell potential meat, then they could at least sell their ‘private properties.’ Meanwhile, a terrible economic depression had hit the country a few years earlier. The elites at that time referred to it as another ‘economic downturn.’

Like rat infestations found in urban slums, government corruption, stock market manipulations, and growing monopolies in certain business sectors began to multiply. Last names such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, and Morgan entered the American lexicon as curse words with ties to nefarious business practices. Poverty abounded and starvation was certain for some unfortunates in the working class. Most African-Americans either died in their youths as working class heroes, or they sold their dignity for some scrap food.

In 1877, the railroad owners, and other captains of industry with ties to the railroad monopolies, then implemented severe wage cuts against their workers. But the workers counterattacked across the United States. Workers’ syndicates, or ‘unions,’ called for a nationwide strike to shut down all the industries related to the labor force of the railroads.

The infamous strike of 1877, or the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, was the only successful General Strike in American history. Workers picketed, stopped scabs from entering the workplace, closed down factories and railroad yards, and refused to leave the owners’ properties.

The General Strike was so successful, that the Republican, ex-Union General turned president, Hayes, called out federal troops to help state militias in exterminating the workers. This executive fiat was the first use of federal troops to put down strikes – which contemporary US elites have continued to utilize against strikers in major US industries. The US government successfully liquidated the striking, radical workers, referring to them as ‘Commune radicals,’ and ‘Socialist-Internationalist, Trade Union conspiracists.’ The strikers had become our contemporary ‘radicalized terrorists.’

Many major urban industrial centers in the US had their massacres of workers: Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis. US government troops and state militias, (later called the National Guard), murdered thousands of workers, including women and children workers. Still to this very day, the US government has hidden the number of murders during the Great Railroad Strike. Some labor historians have stated that about 10,000 workers lost their lives during that strike. This was not just a strike: this state sponsored mass murder represented a joint US government-economic elite war against the working classes.

The US government was not finished with its reaction and tyranny. The Amerikan state apparatus soon devised some incremental changes to the state militia system. Gradually, the state militias would come under the control of the federal government and they would slowly integrate into the Amerikan war machine, under the US Army, later referred to as the National Guard. The political elites also established the Armory system. National Guard units now had their new headquarters in castle like structures, which housed their weapons and military equipment. These armories were conveniently located in America’s industrial centers and towns across the continent. The Liberal Democrat president, Wilson, ultimately transformed the diverse bands of state militias into US Army affiliated State National Guard units.

America’s industrial capitalist elites, ‘captains of industry, or ‘robber barons,’ such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould and Morgan hoped to obtain both vertical and horizontal consolidations of their particular industries, meaning the management of both the production of primary materials, and the distribution centers for manufactured materials. After controlling both production and distribution, their dastardly deeds could move into squashing the small business competitors that still fought against their sacred monopolies. These industrial capitalists consolidated their outrageous holdings through the setting up of ‘trusts’ among the biggest players, which fixed high prices, low wages, and information sharing, all leaving out the smaller contenders.

They also created ‘holding companies,’ or fake companies that the family or the major stockholders also legally controlled. They could both hide their monies and resist the nasty label as ‘monopolists.’ Next, these mega-rich madmen bought the senators, congressmen, governors, and state assembly politicians – and even federal, state and local judges. These top bosses also secured disgraceful legal precedents, which gave them greater rights for their corporations than for average American citizens. Corporations comprised the legal privileges of private corporate entities, while controlling the same legal rights as US citizens! Large corporations have since maintained these superior rights and privileges within American legal precedent.

First, the United States of America had transformed itself into the world haven and military defender of the massive mega corporation, the multi-national business conglomerate, and the super companies with tentacles across the globe. From its Industrial capitalist beginnings, the United States government has always supported and upheld the evil cult of Monopoly Capitalism.

Second, this incredibly violent and unjust political-economic system has only helped a few favored corporate and federally subsidized businesses. In the 1880s, it was mainly railroads, oil, metal fabrication, (iron and steel), and massive cattle slaughter.

These days, the favored industries are large finance firms, the Stock Market, mostly headquartered in Wall St., NYC, and the Federal Reserve banks, such as JP Morgan-Chase, Citibank, US Bank and the Bank of America. Then, the insurance fraudsters come in second, such as Blue Cross, Aetna, Kaiser, MetLife, etc., with the GMO-Biotech food monopolies next on the list, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, McDonald’s, Dean Foods, ConAgra, DuPont, Smithfield, Tyson, etc.

There are also those large real estate conglomerations, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and corporate media trusts, such as Viacom, Disney, GE-NBC, FOX, CNN, etc. And ultimately, and most importantly, there exist the energy and transportation monopolies, such as EXXON-Mobil, Chevron, Koch and Conoco, Delta, GM, Ford, American Airlines, Chrysler and US Airways-United. The military-police-surveillance transportation conglomerations also receive their super pie portions, such the US military and the spy agencies: NSA, FDA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DHS, IRS, DEA with lots of other government initialed bureaucracies.

Third, this brutal capitalist system is unique in the world in that America’s elites, unlike Europe’s elites, interlock with each other between top government positions, private industry boards of directorships, and intellectual foundations, representing both university research centers and think tank organizations. This interlocking and adjustable power elite, with its well-guarded monopoly capitalist system, explains one of the main reasons for the staying power of the Great Sociopathic Empire.

Fourth, the US government has no unemployment social safety net for the majority of Americans that do not work in its favored monopolies. Meanwhile, it ingeniously uses massive amounts of corporate media propaganda to cover up its cruel and criminal political economic system. The economic corporate news always focuses on the Stock Market, phony new jobs numbers, and bogus inflation stats, while common prices rise for the rest of us. This clever flim flam system offers particular free money benefits to a few people, yet gives nothing in return to most other citizens – and refuses to compensate those that have regularly paid their taxes.

For example, I, like millions of others around the country, have been unable to find a job in my field, and have been underemployed for years now. Yet, I am a doctor holding a PhD after six hard years of work. I have no rights to any unemployment money, even though I had paid taxes for five years previously as a working graduate assistant. Americans get almost nothing in return from their high tax rates. However, the favored monopolies tied to the US government receive the full rounds of benefits, welfare dole and privileges.

A few years after the General Strike of 1877, in the 1880s and 90s, the corporate monoliths called for greater open foreign immigration from eastern and southern Europe to lower the wages. The federal government obliged to their wishes completely, where thereby, millions of desperate European immigrants poured into America’s urban centers. Thousands of poor wage slaves worked themselves to death for pittances, a few others starved or died terribly as vagabonds on the city streets, while many others moved from one industry job to another industry job for survival sake. The ones that moved around represented the winners.

Once again in the 1970s and 80s, through the influence of institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, Amerika’s interlocking powerful elites demanded more ‘flexibility’ and ‘greater international investment opportunities’ for their corporations, which implied greater profits for shareholders. The translated business code meant that US-based companies should have easy rights to move their production and manufacturing operations overseas, so that they could tap into a worldwide cheap labor source. Now, many of these US manufacturing giants have their production capacities across the urban slums of Asia. The US government allowed US multinationals to inflict this killer of domestic employment – and D.C. will continue to allow these corrupt practices as long as they hold power.

When in the 1880s and 90s, the top business honchos called for a more ‘educated,’ meaning docile, workforce. Both the US government and state governments bowed to their desires. The Amerikan state public school farce, or the national coercive schooling system, consolidated around Boards of Educations and politician appointees, called ‘administrators.’

Major universities, and even the Ivy Leagues, started to change their school categories from the strict Liberal Arts paradigm towards special programs in Engineering, Applied Sciences, Business and Agricultural Sciences. America’s urban police forces and prison systems expanded their social engineering scope. Since then, this sinister political economy has mixed with insidious social control mechanisms.

By the 1970s and 80s, representatives of the interlocking elites within D.C. based ‘think tanks,’ demanded more ‘values based education’ and they cited a ‘lack of civic responsibilities and basic skill sets,’ among students. The elites were really concerned with the negative aspects of the ‘Sixties attitudes,’ meaning an absence of respect and awe for government authorities and institutions. Within a few years, public schools and universities instituted more skill based testing of students – even starting from the first primary grades! The US government, under the ‘Dept. of Education,’ pushed public schools and universities in the United States to make all of the necessary changes – if they wanted more federal dollars in their coffers.

US govt. officials and university administrators colluded together in allowing a new test monopoly. This ‘not for profit’ corporation took over the testing mania, called the Educational Testing Service or EST. They were the sole company that controlled the moneymaking windfall of SAT and GRE university level exams. Universities and Colleges then forced their students to take useless core curriculum courses on western history and culture, meaning the US and Europe, which added to their already mandatory course lists. American higher education transformed into a secondary high school curriculum. University administrators annually raised tuition by the real inflation rate. The US government then forced states to raise their drinking age from 18 to 21. Finally, American colleges and universities organized campus cop gangs on their territories in order to watch, harass and arrest those same paying students.

The most violent aspect of this system is the lack of any social safety net for average citizens. The United States government however, and throughout its entire history, has continually subsidized its favored corporate monopolies through tax breaks, legal amnesties, money infusions, free of charge police-military enforcements. Even outright nationalisations in order to save the corporate structures have commenced, yet regular Americans receive almost nothing from this same federal government.

US federal, state and municipal government taxes, (including sales, communication and property taxes), rob over 35% in annual savings from most working Americans’ paychecks. I lived in Europe for some years, and this was about the same rate of European socialist-democracy annual taxation. Most Europeans, however, did receive their secure economic backups in case of injury, unemployment and sudden illness.

The sociopathic elites that run this Empire have managed other ingenious methods of social control. In the US, there are various underhanded schemes in obtaining ‘benefits,’ for some form of economic survival. In other words, certain sectors of the American populace have ‘rights’ to particular government handouts or welfare systems, while others are completely excluded.

Cops have legal immunities from arbitrary firing, and even when murdering American civilians in cold blood. If they are under investigation, then they can receive a paid vacation, nefariously called ‘paid administrative suspension.’ State bureaucrats, such as mediocre teachers, district librarians, burnout officials, firemen and general state workers, receive almost complete coverage in pension, medical and dental benefits, and they can easily cash out on their ‘public retirement’ when they have finished their terms. Their retirements are secure because they dip straight from the state and municipal tax trough.

There are other notorious methods in obtaining public monies. For example, people with tattoos on their faces can begin receiving Social Security disability checks even if they are still in their twenties, while families accepted into the Cash-Stamp program can now use the EBT debit card system to cash out inside any business that serves food, inclusive of convenience stores and casinos! Before the debit card graft, the Food Stamp program was quite strict in that the person could only use the vouchers to buy groceries in supermarkets.

The last question is why the US government, which only concerns itself with protecting multinational, corporate monopolies, would allow a few lower class citizens to engage in such underhanded methods in order to secure free money. The answer is that the top criminals and sociopaths use this system as their main divide and conquer social control.

The corporate media loves harping on the lowlife indigents who receive US government checks, while they just sit around watching TV. These scenes especially infuriate the small business owner class that has to front most of the tax burden inside the US. The small business owner class also fears the steep fall into the working class, and the problems associated with such a class.

At the same time, the generals and top officers in the US military-industrial-spy complex, with the boards of director-executives, inside the top banks of the Federal Reserve, receive thousands of dollars in welfare money. Murderous politicians in various fascist governments, such as Colombia and Israel, also receive millions of dollars in annual foreign aid, or international welfare money. As for now, this strategy has worked. The different social classes in Amerika hate each other and blame each other for the coming economic collapse.

The study of history is necessary for us to understand the injustice and structural violence glued within this crooked and infernal system. Since 1790, the US government and their shill corporate elites have successfully weathered various ‘collapses.’ Economic Collapse is just doing business, and it is often good business. As long as there exists the Amerikan Empire of Sociopaths in Washington D.C., they will continue to push and defend global monopoly capitalism. Those citizens fortunate to work in those ‘currently favored industries’ can survive for now. The rest of us have the choices of enlisting in the military, (if we are still young), family money, homelessness or the prison gulag. Our last remaining Monopoly game pieces now wait nervously on the cardboard.